Not every Ukrainian fighting the Russian invasion carries a gun. Some citizen-soldiers sit at their computers for multiple hours every day going on a digital offensive.
There is an informal group of hackers worldwide who have volunteered to wreak havoc on Russian websites, and they are having some success. They are using some old-school techniques that seem to be working, flooding Russian websites with fake traffic. It’s called DDoS, or distributed denial of service, and hackers can do it from their parent’s basements.
An NBC story quoted Shane Huntley, Google’s Threat Analysis Group head, who explained that the DDoS technique is popular and relatively easy for amateur hackers.
“DDoS is the easiest thing to do. It’s one click now. If you’re a teenager anywhere in the world, you can participate. It has the lowest barrier to entry. They also can make a visible, immediate impact. DDoS is the most obvious of all attacks, so it’s really easy to see this activity versus espionage or subtler destruction attacks. It’s very clear when a site goes offline.”
Here’s how we know these attacks are working; several Russian websites have made themselves available to computers that solely have a Russian IP address. Also, Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development and Communications reported that the DDoS attacks are a big problem, and they offered help to Russian banks that were being attacked.
Anonymous has been all-in on their attacks since the invasion began, with the NBC report mentioning the group has forced printers in Russia to kick out anti-war sentiments, amongst other things.
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